It may go down in history as one of the all-time-great discoveries of our pre-COVID-19 Age (assuming, of course, we really do enter a different age in COVID'S aftermath)
I mean our Global Modern Discovery that certain things we humans have long been conditioned to recognize as virtues - patience, kindness, humility, consideration, attentiveness, etc - have been grossly over-rated.
The trouble with these ancient virtues is obvious: Thinking of other people all the time - or hell, even most of the time - is just too much work. And worst of all, work of the wrong kind (which means, conversely, one can never work too hard at the right things). There are just too many different kinds of people out there for them all to be worth thinking about. Even among the various individuals you're likely to meet on a given day, there are far too many different types of them even to keep track of, much less acknowledge and respect and be kind to individually. Surely, then, there must be some larger-scale - or even global? - method of streamlining your dealings with all of them? And in such a way as conduces to the most productive and profitable advantage of the Aggregate Whole?
The solution rather, as our Age has been busy discovering,* is to think and reflect upon the needs of others as little as possible, and instead to think primarily of oneself, but with one CRITICAL proviso: It has got to be your right Self.
* Or at least until we were so rudely interrupted by global pandemic.
The Key - you guessed it - is to make one's Self so perfect(ionist), so efficient, so self-lessly driven and determined and dedicated, so exquisitely, exactingly conscious and conscientious of every slightest flaw, facet and function of the Whole Operation* - to make yourself, in a word, so indispensable - that the people around you don't just excuse your many apparent rudenesses and inconsiderations; they applaud and encourage them. Indeed, they dread the prospect of you becoming even marginally nicer, for fear that the Whole Operation - which could be anything: a country, a company, a church or charity or other agency, or even a single family or household - the Whole Operation will come crashing down like London Bridge. Possibly even to the lasting detriment of the whole global economy. Or at least of your country's place in it.
* Which is, after all, to be mindful of practically everyone in your purview. Maybe not so much of their needs, but most definitely of their uses?
And meanwhile, most of your peers and colleagues - so far as they value their jobs, positions, professional and collegial esteem and reputations, etc - will want to make you more or less their Gold Standard of Indispensability. Even if they otherwise hate you for your seeming abruptness, harshness, etc. Which means that, more and more, they're going to want to see you not just as a necessary prod and goad to their own best efforts, but as an exemplary model of selfless diligence and dedication to the Aggregate Whole (however hard you may be on the individual parts). Or if nothing else, an exemplary rival.
So what's all this got to do with the Coronavirus? Nothing directly, so far as I'm aware. It just seemed to me as good a time as any to reflect on certain fashionable ways of recognizing and rewarding talent - especially within our busy organizations and other collective entities. Ways that, for all their seeming functionality, may become all too quickly dysfunctional in crisis times. And all the more so, during our present crisis of organizational (self-)confidence. As good a time as any to reflect, namely, on those policies of personnel recruitment and advancement that, for all I know, played a vital role in propelling both of us Indispensables - Superchina and Superamerica - into our respective places of highly stoic unpreparedness for the Global Challenge of our Lifetimes.
(Edited.)
27 March 2020
20 March 2020
Seeing the Gods Clearly
Whatever else we may be learning or unlearning through this global tribulation, this much at least, I hope, is clear:
Sobriety is needed. And that word, moreover, in a context we are hardly familiar with, and in a sense in which we Global Moderns wouldn't normally dream of using the term.
Because if this Bold New 21st-Century World (1995-?) doesn't start seeing certain things more clearly, things in general are definitely going to get foggier and clammier, and colder. If we Westerners in particular don't start taking a more sober and hardheaded, more unpoetic and unromantic view of certain things we've hitherto been drunk and mystical about, if we don't start scrutinizing our gods, our fetishes, our ideals and obsessions with a less enwondered and enraptured eye . . .
But what sort of ideals, etc? you ask. Oh, things like, you know, our practice of everybody from everywhere moving about all the time, wheresoever in the globe that money and ambition take them (spouses and children be damned!); things like the social benevolence of digital technology; things like the economic benevolence of Communists who magically stimulate entrepreneurship, and of magical Belts and Roads stretching from Beijing all the way to Rome and Milan and beyond! . . .
. . . If we don't start brutally examining and interrogating these gods with all our heart and soul, well, things may indeed get somewhat better for some period of time. But then they're going to start getting much, much worse, all over again.
(Edited.)
Sobriety is needed. And that word, moreover, in a context we are hardly familiar with, and in a sense in which we Global Moderns wouldn't normally dream of using the term.
Because if this Bold New 21st-Century World (1995-?) doesn't start seeing certain things more clearly, things in general are definitely going to get foggier and clammier, and colder. If we Westerners in particular don't start taking a more sober and hardheaded, more unpoetic and unromantic view of certain things we've hitherto been drunk and mystical about, if we don't start scrutinizing our gods, our fetishes, our ideals and obsessions with a less enwondered and enraptured eye . . .
But what sort of ideals, etc? you ask. Oh, things like, you know, our practice of everybody from everywhere moving about all the time, wheresoever in the globe that money and ambition take them (spouses and children be damned!); things like the social benevolence of digital technology; things like the economic benevolence of Communists who magically stimulate entrepreneurship, and of magical Belts and Roads stretching from Beijing all the way to Rome and Milan and beyond! . . .
. . . If we don't start brutally examining and interrogating these gods with all our heart and soul, well, things may indeed get somewhat better for some period of time. But then they're going to start getting much, much worse, all over again.
(Edited.)
15 March 2020
Some Basic Thoughts on Basic Stuff
Right here you can read what is, in my opinion, quite possibly the wisest and most prudent* overall assessment of our coronaviral predicament and prospects I've run across so far. Far better than anything I could have managed, in any case. And I'm a pretty regular fellow-traveler of both Rod Dreher and his various sources/correspondents, on just about any topic they choose to wrestle with. In brief, I've read rather on a lot on this subject from both him and his readers, including those rare moments when they've seemed to be either over- or under-reacting to it (though, for the record, let me be the last to accuse Mr Dreher of under-reacting to anything, much less COVID-19). So this one article especially seems to me, more than anything else I've yet read, to get the whole issue about just right.
* Prudent - now there's a word that seems quaint enough in this boldly-confident (1995-?) Age.
But what I like in particular about this quite recent post is the way it seems to address both certain natural - including the merely human - and supernatural ramifications of the current crisis. The former are tackled in Mr Dreher's usual rather dead-on, direct fashion, the latter somewhat more obliquely. In fact, I find their treatment - both his and his readers' - of the epidemic's supernatural "side" a mite too oblique and indirect for my tastes. I was especially disappointed (and here I'm open to correction, since I may well have read it too quickly) at what I found to be their general avoidance of a certain very familiar p-word.
The way I figure it is this: God created all beings. And therefore He quite simply knows all these things, and everything about them - backwards and forwards, inside and out - as no one and nothing else can.* Think what a comfort it is, then, that the only Way we humans can be ushered into the Real Presence of any creature, including ourselves - and thereby safeguarded against our own mere ideas, abstractions and reductions, pigeonholes and stereotypes of these creatures - is:
1) through prayer;
2) through that apart from which any prayer is dead or delusional, the grace and love of God.
Think, too, what a blessing it is that the latter should include both His love of us, and our love of Him, and each other. So that even we presumptuous humans can literally, prayerfully love our way into, not a perfect or comprehensive knowledge - but surely the "one thing necessary" to such knowledge? - of any creature, any situation, any problem.
* Think of it! Nothing else: not even the prodigious talents of Man Almighty, as expounded by our - at least until quite recently? - all-sufficient Global Business, in concert with that Master-Civilization of them all which has its center in, and emanates from, Beijing (and of which Washington has been at best a partly-owned subsidiary).
And so naturally, even in non-routine, highly unexpected times like these, we mere humans rightly continue to do our best to seek out the appropriate precautions, and to respect and defer to the appropriate expertise. And (one can only hope) in ways that are free as possible from political bitterness and ideological preconception. But even here, what a comfort and a joy it is to know that the Ultimate Precaution is prayer, and that the One to whom our prayer is directed is also the Ultimate Expert.
(Edited.)
* Prudent - now there's a word that seems quaint enough in this boldly-confident (1995-?) Age.
But what I like in particular about this quite recent post is the way it seems to address both certain natural - including the merely human - and supernatural ramifications of the current crisis. The former are tackled in Mr Dreher's usual rather dead-on, direct fashion, the latter somewhat more obliquely. In fact, I find their treatment - both his and his readers' - of the epidemic's supernatural "side" a mite too oblique and indirect for my tastes. I was especially disappointed (and here I'm open to correction, since I may well have read it too quickly) at what I found to be their general avoidance of a certain very familiar p-word.
The way I figure it is this: God created all beings. And therefore He quite simply knows all these things, and everything about them - backwards and forwards, inside and out - as no one and nothing else can.* Think what a comfort it is, then, that the only Way we humans can be ushered into the Real Presence of any creature, including ourselves - and thereby safeguarded against our own mere ideas, abstractions and reductions, pigeonholes and stereotypes of these creatures - is:
1) through prayer;
2) through that apart from which any prayer is dead or delusional, the grace and love of God.
Think, too, what a blessing it is that the latter should include both His love of us, and our love of Him, and each other. So that even we presumptuous humans can literally, prayerfully love our way into, not a perfect or comprehensive knowledge - but surely the "one thing necessary" to such knowledge? - of any creature, any situation, any problem.
* Think of it! Nothing else: not even the prodigious talents of Man Almighty, as expounded by our - at least until quite recently? - all-sufficient Global Business, in concert with that Master-Civilization of them all which has its center in, and emanates from, Beijing (and of which Washington has been at best a partly-owned subsidiary).
And so naturally, even in non-routine, highly unexpected times like these, we mere humans rightly continue to do our best to seek out the appropriate precautions, and to respect and defer to the appropriate expertise. And (one can only hope) in ways that are free as possible from political bitterness and ideological preconception. But even here, what a comfort and a joy it is to know that the Ultimate Precaution is prayer, and that the One to whom our prayer is directed is also the Ultimate Expert.
(Edited.)
01 March 2020
He's a New World Man (right?)
I am a notorious snail, if not sloth, at processing news. But especially the kind of news that's sure to attract a flurry of publicity and controversy. So naturally, here it is, almost a month since the latest US Presidential State of the Union address, and I have no clearer notion of what it signals or portends - whether of the recent past or the near future - than I did when I first heard it. I just wish I could be reasonably sure, one way or the other, that we as a country have been turning a real corner - and a good one (as distinct, of course, from one that takes us straight into the waiting arms of a potentially epic-scale[?] global health crisis).
I repeat: a good corner - one such as finds America at last starting down a fresh, what I'd like to call emphatically post-Clinton-Bush-Obama path of national (in)security. As opposed to continuing down the same, 25-years-familiar road of Permanent War as both Way of Profit and Way of Peace. Only now with the wretched difference of the same Exceptionalist message being delivered in a more crass, bombastic and "populistic" style of presentation.
In fact, about the only thing I'm fairly convinced of is the nature of the street we've been on so far, for the better part of at least the 21st century. For some time now it has seemed to me that the world as a whole has been shaping up into a most interesting and exciting place. The kind of place not altogether unlike certain rougher, more lawless times and spaces of the Old American West: a sort of world in which those with the most drive, cold rationality and initiative - along with, some might argue, the least sensitive consciences and faculties of remorse - are more or less free to dispose of the rest of us as they choose. In brief, it has seemed to be becoming a kind of globe consisting of more and more lawless places, regions, countries, etc, in which men and women with, yes, sufficient wealth and connections - but also more than enough grit and gumption - were now free as never before to become as big as they liked. With ultimately the only thing constraining them (within their particular compass of influence anyway) being some other men and women getting bigger and likely meaner still, and then taking their place. And of course there would always remain the time-honored option of the two or more of them combining, splitting the difference, etc.
There were also two notable ways, as I saw it, in which this expanding New World seemed to differ from that of the Old West:
(1) There were, or would soon be, fewer and fewer places of stable settlement, law-abidingness, peace and comparative democracy surrounding these, as it were, emerging Global Frontiers, such as might otherwise be able to contain, much less engulf, these various titans, Goliaths, emerging Leviathans, etc. (Indeed, at times it has seemed to me more like one big continuous Modern Global Frontier, which unlike the old ones, does far more encroaching than it is encroached upon, and whose one officially titled and recognized Federal Marshal - the US Blob - seems at least as much on the side of the outlaws as of the homesteaders.)
(2) These same titans, much like the Robber Barons of the late 19th century, were fully capable of being not just fronted by, but actually becoming corporations: collective Goliaths, as it were, seemingly now faceless, yet in a strange way still able to embody and perpetuate the spirit of the founding giant.
And naturally the bigger and more conglomerate the giants got, the less they would be satisfied with anything short of the entire globe as their Old West-style play- and stomping-grounds. And after that - why, what would there be left for anyone else to do? Except to watch as the Big Fish turned this great big globe - at least so far as its smaller fish were concerned - into the littlest, most cramped, most unbreatheable pond you ever saw. Much less tried to swim and feed in.
But again, that may be just one more phase of history turning its corner and rounding off to a close. I just wish I could be sure of it. More specifically, I wish I might be reasonably persuaded that the seeming wild cards, the mavericks of this past decade - Trumps, Putins, Orbans, Salvinis, etc - really were a different kettle of fish: that they really are - eventually? - going to provide some semblance of multipolar balance, stability and sanity to this otherwise increasingly volatile, friendly-only-to-the-biggest-and-wealthiest Global Wild West. As opposed to their being, you know, more of the same old Big Fish, just of a slightly different color.
I repeat: a good corner - one such as finds America at last starting down a fresh, what I'd like to call emphatically post-Clinton-Bush-Obama path of national (in)security. As opposed to continuing down the same, 25-years-familiar road of Permanent War as both Way of Profit and Way of Peace. Only now with the wretched difference of the same Exceptionalist message being delivered in a more crass, bombastic and "populistic" style of presentation.
In fact, about the only thing I'm fairly convinced of is the nature of the street we've been on so far, for the better part of at least the 21st century. For some time now it has seemed to me that the world as a whole has been shaping up into a most interesting and exciting place. The kind of place not altogether unlike certain rougher, more lawless times and spaces of the Old American West: a sort of world in which those with the most drive, cold rationality and initiative - along with, some might argue, the least sensitive consciences and faculties of remorse - are more or less free to dispose of the rest of us as they choose. In brief, it has seemed to be becoming a kind of globe consisting of more and more lawless places, regions, countries, etc, in which men and women with, yes, sufficient wealth and connections - but also more than enough grit and gumption - were now free as never before to become as big as they liked. With ultimately the only thing constraining them (within their particular compass of influence anyway) being some other men and women getting bigger and likely meaner still, and then taking their place. And of course there would always remain the time-honored option of the two or more of them combining, splitting the difference, etc.
There were also two notable ways, as I saw it, in which this expanding New World seemed to differ from that of the Old West:
(1) There were, or would soon be, fewer and fewer places of stable settlement, law-abidingness, peace and comparative democracy surrounding these, as it were, emerging Global Frontiers, such as might otherwise be able to contain, much less engulf, these various titans, Goliaths, emerging Leviathans, etc. (Indeed, at times it has seemed to me more like one big continuous Modern Global Frontier, which unlike the old ones, does far more encroaching than it is encroached upon, and whose one officially titled and recognized Federal Marshal - the US Blob - seems at least as much on the side of the outlaws as of the homesteaders.)
(2) These same titans, much like the Robber Barons of the late 19th century, were fully capable of being not just fronted by, but actually becoming corporations: collective Goliaths, as it were, seemingly now faceless, yet in a strange way still able to embody and perpetuate the spirit of the founding giant.
And naturally the bigger and more conglomerate the giants got, the less they would be satisfied with anything short of the entire globe as their Old West-style play- and stomping-grounds. And after that - why, what would there be left for anyone else to do? Except to watch as the Big Fish turned this great big globe - at least so far as its smaller fish were concerned - into the littlest, most cramped, most unbreatheable pond you ever saw. Much less tried to swim and feed in.
But again, that may be just one more phase of history turning its corner and rounding off to a close. I just wish I could be sure of it. More specifically, I wish I might be reasonably persuaded that the seeming wild cards, the mavericks of this past decade - Trumps, Putins, Orbans, Salvinis, etc - really were a different kettle of fish: that they really are - eventually? - going to provide some semblance of multipolar balance, stability and sanity to this otherwise increasingly volatile, friendly-only-to-the-biggest-and-wealthiest Global Wild West. As opposed to their being, you know, more of the same old Big Fish, just of a slightly different color.
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